The present invention is related to stringed musical instruments of the lute family, and more specifically to electrified versions of such instruments. The invention is particularly adaptable to violins, including the contrabass (also called the double bass or upright bass).
A traditional lute family instrument includes an enclosed resonant sound chamber, or body, and a neck, with strings stretched along the neck and over at least a portion of the body. The instruments are played by bowing, strumming, or plucking the strings while clamping them (with the player's fingers) at various points along the neck in order to change the pitches of the resulting tones.
In most cases, the body has no real acoustic function in modern day electrified versions of these instruments, since most, if not all, of the desired sound characteristics can be, and usually are, supplied by the electronic circuitry. However, the structural shapes of the bodies have generally been carried along into electrified versions of the instruments to provide a familiar reference for the player. In the case of the electrified double bass (prior to the present invention), a large body still served a function, i.e., that of preventing the instrument from spinning on its axis when being played. Up until the present invention, a double bass player usually was required to hold the instrument against his or her body to resist the twisting tendency.
The double bass was originally intended primarily to be bowed, and so has a high arch at the bridge to allow selection by the bow of individual strings. A relatively narrow waist on the body is provided in conventional double basses in order to allow bowing of the high and low strings. The bowing position is therefore limited to the waist area.
Conventionally, the back of the neck is convex in shape, which results in a rather thick neck, particularly in instruments which have five or more strings. This neck shape is undesirable from the point of view of ease of playing.
For modern applications of the double bass, as in jazz for example, plucking the strings is more common than bowing. It is therefore important that a modern electric double bass perform well both plucked and bowed. It is also desirable that the bowing position not be limited as it is in traditional double basses.